Category Archives: rights

Convenience and the FBI

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Stewart Whitson, late of the FBI and currently Foundation for Government Accountability Legal Director, decried in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau effort to completely eliminate the ability of credit-reporting companies to sell credit-header data to law enforcement agencies, including to the FBI. Those header data include a variety of identifying material but, as Whitson was careful to emphasize, no financial information.

This, actually, is one of the few things the CFPB would get right were it to follow through.

In support of his plaint, Whitson related an 8-year-old incident in which he and a partner were conducting surveillance on a suspect and observing his contact with a third individual. Whitson bragged about being able to use credit-header data—but no financial data, mind you—to contact that third individual, arrange a meeting, and through that, foil the suspect’s planned terrorist attack.

Without the credit-header data, we might not have been able to contact the occupant for a while, giving [the suspect] more time to carry out his attack.

Whitson bragged about FBI success with such purchases and then put his disingenuous question.

I worked on hundreds of terrorism-related investigations at the FBI, all of which relied on credit-header data. Why doesn’t the CFPB want law enforcement to have quick access to this information?

Perhaps because the purchases are, at bottom, violations of our Constitution’s inconvenient 4th Amendment, regardless of their convenient-to-government speed.

How inconvenient it is, after all, to follow the Constitution’s requirement for warrants before searches occur. That the FBI got lucky—or even that purchasing personally identifying data (the lack of financial data being a cynically offered red herring here) materially helped—in no way legitimizes the FBI’s bypassing Constitutional requirements.

Get the warrants. If it often takes too long to get them, and that’s a legitimate beef, work on streamlining the process through the political branches of our government: the House and Senate. The Executive Branch does not get to skip the hard work or usurp political branch authorities.

Not even when its FBI claims that anxious and enthusiastic mothers at school boards are akin to domestic terrorists or that traditional Catholics are behaving suspiciously.

Customer Choice

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New Mexico’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has gotten to be enacted rules mandating battery cars and trucks in New Mexico.

Starting in calendar year 2026, 43% of all new passenger cars and light-duty trucks shipped to New Mexico auto dealerships by national auto manufacturers must be zero emission vehicles. Similarly, beginning in calendar year 2026, 15% of all new commercial heavy-duty trucks shipped to New Mexico auto dealerships by national auto manufacturers must be zero emission vehicles. These percentages gradually increase over time.

“Increase over time:” by 2031, those 43% rise to 82%. By 2034, the minima for Ford F-250, Ford F-450, and tractor-trailer type trucks rise to 55%, 75%, and 40%, respectively.

Disingenuously, Lujan Grisham says regarding those limits on choice,

The adoption of these rules is a victory for customer choice….

That’s the Progressive-Democrat’s definition of customer choice: the State taking on the burden of choosing, thereby relieving its subjects citizens of that burden.

No. I decline to use Lujan Grisham’s Newspeak Dictionary. I’ll stay with American English dictionaries and their definitions of “customer choice:” us ordinary Americans acting on our own selections.

That choice is clear, too, for the good citizens of New Mexico, who’ve already made theirs: less than 1% of the 650,000 vehicles registered in New Mexico, despite tax credits, are EVs. Those good citizens do, however, need to select better at the next ballot box.

Religious Persecution

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Finland Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola stood (still stand?) accused by Finnish prosecutor Anu Mantila of the heinous hate speech crime of quoting from the Bible.

Finnish district courts said, no, and acquitted the two. The prosecutor objected and took the cases to a Finnish appellate court—where the two were once again acquitted. Räsänen:

It isn’t a crime to tweet a Bible verse, or to engage in public discourse with a Christian perspective. The attempts made to prosecute me for expressing my beliefs have resulted in an immensely trying four years, but my hope is that the result will stand as a key precedent to protect the human right to free speech.

Mantila’s weasel-worded rationalization of her decisions:

You can cite the Bible, but it is Räsänen’s interpretation and opinion about the Bible verses that are criminal[.]

Well, no, they’re not, not within any universally recognized concept of free speech and opinion-uttering.

Mantila may well appeal again, to the Supreme Court of Finland. If she does, the case will cease to be a matter of prosecution (if it ever was); it will be naked religious persecution and a parallel direct attack on the principles underlying free speech.

Dangerous Settlement

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Bob Updegrove, a Virginia-based photographer, has settled his case against the State of Virginia and its Virginia Values Act, which barred “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, public and private employment, public accommodations, and access to credit. The Act includes denying folks their right to demur on the basis of their religious beliefs.

Citing the recent 303 Creative LLC v Elenis Supreme Court case, Updegrove’s case was ultimately dismissed by both parties in appeals court on the agreement that he would not be forced to take part in same-sex weddings.

Agreement. Settlements start out being dangerous, since they’re binding only on the parties to the litigation, and they depend on the agreeing parties adhering to their agreements. In the Updegrove case, the settlement does not prevent the State from enforcing its Act against other photographers, other graphic designers, or anyone else who objects to something based on their own religious beliefs.

Worse, it depends on Virginia’s AG, Jason Miyares’, word. Which he immediately exposed as questionable:

“As Attorney General, my highest duty is to the federal Constitution. I am pleased that with the settlement, the law is upheld at no cost to the taxpayers and Mr Updegrove’s First Amendment rights are preserved,” he added.
The attorney general, however, still maintains the authority to enforce the Virginia Values Act, including against Updegrove, based on conduct outside the complaint.

Updegrove’s First Amendment rights are not circumscribed by the bounds of this specific case. His rights extend throughout his life, yet Miyares has just committed to attempting to cut short those rights whenever he can find something outside this settlement on which to do so.

Better would have been to force the matter through the courts and get Virginia’s Act itself cut short on the basis of the Supreme’s 303 Creative LLC v Elenis ruling.

FISA and Search Warrants

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The House Judiciary Committee is moving to seriously revamp FISA, the Act that was set up to deal with    widespread privacy violations by the Federal government during the Nixon administration.  It was intended to enable the government to surveil foreign persons and to limit the government’s surveillance to those foreign persons, and it includes a secretive and secret court to enable issuance of search warrants supporting that surveillance. The Act was promptly abused by the FBI and the Feds’ intelligence agencies to spy on us ordinary Americans, also, most recently during the runup to the Trump administration and continuing throughout that term, and since.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this year declassified a report revealing that FBI agents had inappropriately searched Americans’ phone records more than 270,000 times over a two year period, alarming civil liberty experts and generating bipartisan condemnation.

Bad as that abuse is, it’s also bad that that secret FISA court had been hiding that abuse behind its “classified” wall. This secret, Star Chamber court has been contributing its own abuses to the Act: it has acknowledged that the FBI had overtly lied to it on a number of those warrants, but then it had not only exacted no punishment, it continued blithely to accept FBI agents’ word on subsequent warrant applications. All of that is on top of the fundamental abuse that is the secret nature of this court, which aside from violating the spirit, if not the letter, of our court system, allows it to inflict those other abuses on us ordinary Americans.

Any suitable reform of the FISA Act must include disbanding altogether FISA’s Star Chamber Court. To the extent that the government worries about getting a warrant would tip off the bad guys—and it’s a legitimate concern—Article III courts and State courts all know how to seal and protect warrants when that’s…warranted.